- Howdy, I'm John Hart Asher.

This week on "Central Texas Gardener", get design ideas for garden beds and patio containers.

On tour, Jennie Ostertag broke a few shovels, turning her blank yard into magical moments for family, friends, and wildlife.

Jay Arredondo from Desert to Tropics puts us on the right track to success with succulents, Daphne answers your questions, and Melissa Hagen-Wilson combines flowers and herbs.

So let's get growing right here, right now, - [Announcer] "Central Texas Gardener" is made possible by the generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden.

Thank you.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - Jennie Ostertag broke a few shovels, turning her blank yard into magical moments for family, friends, and wildlife.

- Every season, paths change and the plants change, the light changes, and so, you know, kind of working with that, it's taught me a lot about patience (laughs) and being open to having things change every season, it never looks the same.

Hi, I'm Jennie Ostertag, I'm a gardener and landscape designer here in Austin, Texas.

I moved back to Austin in 2012 and we came into this home when it was a completely blank slate.

All of the soil back here, it's very heavy clay with a lot of limestone rock content.

So I have added a lot of leaf content, a lot of compost, a lot of mulch over the years to break that up, but it did start out pretty gummy.

The compost additions have really lifted it and I leave a lot of the leaves too, even the oak leaves that are slower to break down, I make sure to leave some of those or to chop them up so that it goes back into that soil and breaks it up.

So now the soil has become pretty good, but it is very rocky.

I've joked that I'm farming Texas potatoes, which really is just like hunks of limestone, (laughs) I've broken three shovels digging and that's when I was told that there are rock bars so I now have two rock bars, so hopefully, I will be breaking fewer shovels.

The grass conversion back here, it's happened over the last 10 years, basically.

So little by little, I have sheet composted and taken over invasive Bermuda grass and just dead soil.

The way this has all developed has been very organic and experimental, meaning there wasn't some master plan, it's a constant state of evolution.

And so, if I see a neighbor that had a load of bricks, this was five different neighbors that had bricks that I picked up at different times, or all these flagstones and field stones, some of them were dug up in this yard through this process.

I worked from the outside in, basically starting at the back fence and the perimeters and then have worked my way towards the patio.

Part of how the garden developed the way it did is I was looking for the light and looking for where the soil was most receptive to planting when I started planting in those areas.

So the gardens back where my shed is, I had the best light in the yard there, they got the most morning east-facing sunlight and so that was the easiest place to get plants to thrive and where I did a lot of experimentation.

And then as I spent more and more time here, I started saying, okay, where are the other magical moments of light and soil?

So the next kind of special place in the yard was under this mott of oak trees where I just, it was a really lovely place to sit.

And so, it was saying, okay, I want to sit in this space, let me see what it would look like to build around that seating area.

So it was taking discreet places around the yard and saying, what is drawing me there?

Is it the light?

Is it the soil?

What is making this moment special?

Or what can I see out of this window?

What do you see when you open the gate and walk through?

Or what do you see when you're literally taking out the trash (laughs) to greet you as you exit your kitchen?

I like to have a lot of layering both in the plant material and in the little picture frame vignettes that catch your eye just to create a composition in that area, so I think that's kind of how I try to approach it is wherever your eye looks to try and see it as a full composition with not just plant material but other things for your eye to land on.

Along this fence on the side here, when we first bought this house, it was the only area that I think had been gardened at all and it was just a bed of tropical sage.

But we wanted to have some screening along the side there.

The first things I planted were the wax myrtles, which are great for screening and hedge, but through our ice and snowstorms, they have repeatedly been beaten back.

We had a huge ash growing back there as well, that snowpocalypse took out the ash, we replanted with a Shumard oak.

I have an American beautyberry, sweet almond verbena, Texas persimmon, and sky pencil holly, evergreen sumac, and in front of that is our rain gardens.

We have storm water that comes through the side of our house and locates there.

So we would have a big area of our yard that was just a mud pit and would not drain quickly.

So one year, I decided to build a rain garden and dug down and basically till I hit limestone bedrock about a foot down, and that became kind of the basis for this planting area that collects water.

So when we get a big rain event, it will fill up, but it empties out within 24 hours for sure, sometimes in four to eight hours, even if we have multiple inches of rain.

I come back here and do what I feel inspired to do on any given day or through what plants come to me through friends or what you find on sale or what's in season that inspires you that day.

I love salvia sages, they're easy to take clippings of and share with neighbors.

And so, that's how a lot of this got started was pass along plants, the cannas, the salvias, the fountain grasses, so much back here, tells the story of my friends that are gardeners, which has been really lovely.

And then, during the pandemic, one of my friends, Rebecca, started a free plant stand not too far from here where both for house plants and plants in the yard, you can leave clippings or take rooted cuttings.

So a lot of it has come to feel like more of a designed composition over time as we do that sharing.

When you take one plant that multiplies and spread it around your garden, suddenly, it looks much more like an intentional design because you're using that repetition.

I have some supplemental drip irrigation, but it's very minimal.

I keep the things that need to be hand watered that are my precious plants in my pots near my back door where I collect rainwater.

The first pond I started with was just purely for rainwater collection, I didn't have any plants growing in it, I just put it under a gutter that collected rain 'cause I wanted to be able to water plants with rainwater.

And so, the next one I put in was level with the ground where I got, again, from a neighbor, a tub that they were giving away that I think was a horse trough or something, that one I buried in the ground because I wanted to have wildlife access to it.

So I wanted frogs and lizards and the birds and stuff to be able to go to the edge of the rocks and then be able to drink.

That kind of moved it more towards just wildlife, serving the wildlife versus just rainwater collection.

So I put another trough with more plants and another bubbler where I can see it out of my kitchen window and, you know, made that the centerpiece of a memory garden for a friend of mine.

We have had major impacts from the last several freeze events.

The snowpocalypse took out the ash tree first and then the ice storm this February took out half of this ash juniper cedar tree.

It opened up a lot more light so it allowed, you know, for a lot more flowering things and perennials.

Where we saw the most change from losing a tree was in the front yard.

We had a huge live oak tree, that was probably the main reason I was interested in seeing this house.

And when the ice storm finally took that tree out, it completely changed the light conditions.

So the front garden had to be reimagined because most of the things that had been under the canopy of that oak didn't survive the ice storm either.

So all of those plantings, probably 80% of the plantings had to be reimagined since February and were planted in April and May.

I was out gardening one day and just feeling, I like the solitude of the garden, but I was feeling a bit alone in the challenge of gardening here and feeling like I just needed to talk about that and share that and learn from other people how they're responding to that and what I can do to help.

So I have not had a social media presence before I started this TikTok channel on a whim.

It's just the authentic, what's happening in the garden today point of view.

And I think a lot of people responded to that and that resonated with people to say, you can start small and you can do a lot of things for free or to work within community to build a garden over time.

Landscape design is a second career for me, I spent 15 years in corporate HR, in highly interactive people-facing roles, and my stress relief was coming out into the garden and having some solitude and really getting grounded physically and mentally in the soil.

It's been an evolution, I don't know where the end will be, but much like what I love about gardening, I don't have to figure out the end right now, we can see where this goes.

(chuckles) - Here at "Central Texas Gardener", we run into a lot of people who think that succulents are the easiest plants to grow.

Well, sure, they can be, but like anything else, you've got to treat them right.

Today, Jay Arredondo, from Desert to Tropics, puts us on the right track to growing spectacular containers.

How you doing, Jay?

- Hi, John, I'm doing great, thank you.

- I gotta start out with this because I am not an expert on succulents, and what is the number one issue that people seem to have in your opinion when they're trying to grow these beautiful plants?

- The number one issue is watering and it's over watering, and people like to water their plants, like ivies and flowers and everything else on a regular schedule, if it needs water, doesn't need water, people are putting water and it works for them.

But for cactus, it just does not.

And so, what we wanna do is let your plants dry out between waterings and make sure they're nice and warm in a well lit spot and it's better to water 'em less than water 'em more.

- Okay, so that's key.

So over watering is just the main thing you see.

- It's the main thing, and the problem is also is when the plants get too much water and the roots begin to suffer, people's natural response is to wanna water 'em more.

- Sure.

- And then that does even more damage.

- So it's a vicious water cycle.

- Yes.

- (laughs) So let's talk about some of the other things that you just mentioned, so light is key, right, I mean.

- [Jay] Light's key, for sure.

- So if you're taking some of these home, usually, I know I've seen them, they're in a greenhouse or something like that, there's a lot of light, but maybe people put them in too much shade.

What's really the best condition for some of these?

- Well, for cactus, they can certainly take lot more light and even heavier sun, especially during the summer, the succulents, the leafy type of plants, they like dappled light.

In spring, they can take full sun, but as we get into the summer, when it gets blazing, they like to be backed off under like patio light, under tree light.

If they've been acclimated in spring, you know, some of them can definitely take, you know, a full sun situation all all year round.

But for the most part, the succulents, they're gonna appreciate a little bit of shade.

It's kind of like if your skin's burning and that sun's beating on you, the plants are feeling the same way, the succulents, and they just can't cool off as normal like other plants may with the thinner leaves, you know, they have a lot of water in 'em, it heats up.

- [John] Right.

- And so, they choke and so you just want to give 'em a little bit of extra, you know, a little bit of shade to help, you know, give them some sun protection.

- But every plant loves its soil and their specific soil types.

What's best for succulents?

- Everyone can have their own recipe.

The one main thing that they all should have in common is good drainage.

- [John] Okay.

- And so it can be, you know, a peat moss based, it can be a compost organic type of soil, you know, it can have, you know, gravel, rocks, whatever, you know, things to lighten it up, perlite even.

But the main thing is you wanna have it lightened up where the roots can drain.

- I would take it, if we're over watering or if it's not draining those roots are becoming too saturated and you're getting root rot or is it?

- Well, they breathe, also the roots breathe, they have a oxygen exchange.

So when they are smothered, they can't take in the oxygen like normal and that's what makes 'em suffer.

- Okay.

On par with that too is the container you're gonna put it in because I know I've seen some really beautiful pots or whatnot that look great, but I've noticed some of them maybe don't have drain holes.

So what pots would you suggest when you're looking to do this?

- Yeah, any pots will work as long as they've got drainage or if they don't have drainage, you know, you wanna put a really thick layer of rocks underneath it so the rocks can help wick out some of that water and leave the upper portion, you know, where it can dry.

- You still would wanna be careful about over watering there too, right?

- Yeah, definitely so, because you can, if you really saturate your pot, you can literally fill that pot up where it's just completely full with water.

And so, that's something you'll still wanna think about.

If you're just lightly watering your stuff regularly, you know, that may work, but, you know, ultimately, I think the drain holes, you know, take care of that right away.

But if you can have drainage, that's a plus, you know, you wanna have drainage, that way you're not trying to figure it out.

They can be plastic, they can be terracotta, they can be steel even.

But the important thing is just to have the drainage.

- With some of those pots too, if they don't have a drainage hole, then you could, even if you love the pot, you could probably make a hole, right?

- Yeah, yeah, I've done that countless times where, you know, you can just get a get like a masonry type bit and you can drill a hole or two or three or however many depending on how big your pot is and that takes care of the problem.

- [John] And what about fertilizing or food for these plants?

Do you need to do, I would assume maybe that might be another problem too, is they think, oh, it's not looking good, I need to give it some more.

What do these plants really require to thrive?

- They do obviously eat food, they consume food that helps 'em grow.

And so, periodically, you know, you can fertilize with any kind of fertilizer.

You can incorporate like a time release, you know, fertilizer in the soil, you can put manure in the soil and any of it is gonna help, anything is gonna help.

And they don't need a lot of it because they, you know, they're not making big bushes of, say, like a big tomato plant or something like that.

But you will definitely see some great results with giving some extra food.

- [John] What about cold hardiness?

What about these with these guys?

- Well, you know, here in central Texas, we have winters where they're mild and some we have where, you know, like just a couple, we were like five degrees.

So anything at five degrees isn't gonna make it, and I'd really like to say, you know, have better wishes for that.

But for freeze temperatures, if they're in containers, I would bring them in.

- [John] Okay.

- Or, you know, bring 'em under a patio cover or somewhere or even cover them up.

- [John] Right.

- And the cactus will fare better during a freeze than the succulents.

And so, the best thing I would say is keep 'em dry.

- Okay.

- And cover 'em up or bring 'em in.

- Okay, and then let's get to the fun part of it.

If you're gonna do a dish or container design, like how would you approach that?

Because I've seen some beautiful examples here.

- Thank you.

Color and texture is where you wanna, you know, start.

And so, if you have, you know, 20 plants, but you can only fit 10 in a pot, well, you know, you wanna have some height, some low grown plants and some colors.

So as you can see with some of these right here, we chose a number of different kinds with all different colors, pack 'em in real tight, they look super good to begin with.

Or if you wanna start smaller with smaller plants and let 'em grow and you can certainly do that, but pretty much with the succulents, anything's gonna go, some might overpower, you know, might get a little bigger than, you know, some of the other ones and you just kind of have to figure that out as you go along.

But for the most part, for the first few months, whatever you put together, it's gonna stay reasonably the same for a while before you have to start thinking, okay, this is getting bigger or, you know, this is not doing well or whatever.

But by far and large, you know, the succulents are gonna take the same amount of care and they should progress about the same.

- Okay, and then what are some, for people who like the ones that do flower, what are some, a few of the best flowering species do you think, varieties?

- You know, the Echeveria, which are the ones that do have flowers on 'em right now, those things are reliable bloomers and they're really nice 'cause they have different colors and they hold 'em up on big long stalks.

Some of the cactus that we have here that are currently blooming are spring bloomers, some are fall bloomers, some are summer bloomers.

And so, those are kind of seasonal.

I'd love to say, you know, they'll flower like rose bushes where once the season starts and they're constantly doing it, but they kind of do 'em in cycles.

- They're ephemeral so they're here and there.

- Sure.

- Okay.

And so, you've got some wonderful plants here and they're just absolutely stunning.

Where can people find you?

- Oh, well, almost everywhere here in Austin, central Texas, you can find these plants at a number of local nurseries here and, of course, we can also find 'em at Desert to Tropics and that's where we grow it all and we're where all of it's contained, and if they're not at the nurseries, we can definitely find it at our place.

- Wonderful, Jay, thank you so much for coming in today.

Absolutely gorgeous, appreciate you sharing your insight with these beautiful plants.

- All right, thank you.

- Now let's check in with Daphne Richards.

(bright music) - Our question this week is, how often should I water my container plants?

Well, since the answer depends on many different factors, let's discuss a few of them.

First, what kind of plant do you have?

And is it in shade or sun?

Just as in the landscape, plants in containers have different water requirements.

So first, do a little research as to whether your plant is generally categorized as low, medium, or high water use.

Next, what type of container is it in?

Unglazed terracotta planters are extremely porous and will need more water than glazed ceramic pots, plastic containers or other materials.

Also important is the maturity of the plant.

Was it recently planted?

And is it in the proper size container?

A good rule of thumb is to only plant up by one size container as your plant grows and you transplant it.

Too much soil surrounding the root zone can set up a situation where the water stays too wet around the perimeter of the container, leading to potential disease and other issues.

Next, is your container in full sun?

What season of the year is it?

Is it in full sun in the middle of the summer?

Many container plants might require water every day or even twice a day, and any wind at all will dry out your plants even faster.

If the container is small enough to lift, I like to pick it up and gauge how dry the potting soil is by the weight of the pot.

Watering container plants is definitely a trial and error process as you learn the water needs for your particular plant and your unique situation.

But don't be intimidated.

Luis has some lovely boxwoods planted in large containers and these might only need water once a month or so until the season gets hotter and the plants get larger.

At which point, they may need to be watered weekly or perhaps more often depending on the weather.

If in doubt, you can always pick up a soil moisture meter to insert down into the root zone to help you learn your plants' water use throughout its lifetime.

Now here's something fun from Linda and Greg Nelle in Round Rock.

They grow many plants for the wildlife, but never did they expect to find goldfinches munching on their Swiss chard.

And from my own yard, this little guy recently gave me a terrible fright.

After I calmed down and retrieved a very long metal stake from the shed, I ushered this venomous but relatively docile coral snake back into the green belt behind my house from whence I'm guessing it came after a heavy rainstorm the night before.

We'd love to hear from you.

Head to centraltexasgardner.org to send us your questions, pictures, and videos.

- Let's head over to Backyard Basics with Melissa Hagen-Wilson.

(bright music) - My name is Melissa Hagen-Wilson, and today I'm gonna share with you some of my favorite herbs and summer flowers.

First, we have hibiscus sabdariffa.

It's also called roselle, this plant has edible leaves and calyxes that make a refreshing tea full of vitamin C. She's native to Africa and she really likes it hot.

This one is a starter size, so plant it early in the year in a nice big pot, or I've had it do really the best in the ground, full sun and it regrows from seed very easily, you can save seeds for next year.

Next, I have a little baby lemon eucalyptus.

I really like to pair a perennial, a longer lived plant, with an annual, a little shorter lived marigold is in here with it and the marigold won't last as long as the eucalyptus, it'll peter out.

But the eucalyptus, those grow up to 60 feet in their native habitat of Australia, so it will grow multiple feet in one year.

You can keep it in a small pot like this, kind of like a bonsai, you should protect it from the freezes in the winter, and you can cut it back if you do plant it in the ground, and over winter, it's similar to a citrus or a banana.

Lemongrass is another favorite tea of mine.

I like to use it in flower arrangements for bouquets and it's very zesty in teas.

It's hardy to about 15 degrees, so it also will need protection or to be brought indoors.

Holy basil is another favorite tea of mine, it's native to India where it's considered sacred.

Tulsi is an adaptogen, so it will help your body to adapt to stress.

Ancient Ayurvedic wisdom suggested that tulsi was a tonic for the body, mind and spirit.

I love to use it in teas, I take cuttings and do flower arrangements.

They root very easily in water, which means you can share them with your friends.

I always like to throw out seeds around the corners of my vegetable garden, so a lot of zinnias are great for pollinators, cosmos are another easy to grow flower, dill and holy basil, very easy to grow from seed and they definitely will bring the pollinators.

The black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars are attracted to dill and also rue, this is another one that I always have around for the caterpillars.

I like to pair colors that are either opposite to each other on the color wheel, or I like to pair a flower with a similar colored herb.

There's a lot of different ways that you can aesthetically go with your color choices.

Silver thyme is another great little herb for pots, I've paired it here with a red zinnia.

So here I have calibrachoa with mint, and I've done the same thing where the calibrachoa may not last longer than a season, it's a great summer annual, but the mint is gonna live forever in this pot.

So eventually, the flower might not be there, but the mint will take over the pot.

Another great way to get color in your planters is to mix celosias with Swiss chards.

The Swiss chards come in great shades of yellow and orange, the peppermint chard, and the celosia also comes in very feathery shapes, many different colors and varieties.

A bonus plant that I brought is this turquoise shrimp plant, and it's hard to find, but it's also called green ice crossandra.

For Backyard Basics, I'm Melissa Hagen-Wilson.

- Find out more and watch online at centraltexasgardner.org.

Until next time, remember, adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - [Announcer] Central Texas Gardener is made possible by the generous support from Lisa and Desi Rhoden.

Thank you.

(flute trilling)